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Local elections in South Africa: Rainbow nation, right this time
The ANC has lost South Africa's local elections. More than thirty years after the end of apartheid, the country is now becoming politically more plural and diverse. more...
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For thirty years nothing happened in South Africa without Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC). As a representative of the black majority of the population in South Africa, he had made immense sacrifices in order to peacefully end the white reign of terror known as apartheid. After this was finally achieved in 1994, the ANC ruled unchallenged for decades.
That's over now. And once it crumbles, it happens very quickly. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, the ANC lost its absolute majority for the first time. Now he's not even the strongest force in most major cities. Only 30 percent of South Africans voted for the ANC in last week's local elections. In many large cities it is just 20 percent. Only in remote rural regions do people have no alternative to the old liberation movement.
A generational change is taking place, and it is irreversible and consequential. The South Africa of the 2020s has different problems than the South Africa of the 1990s, and the solutions of yesteryear are not the solutions of today.
The taz is an independent, left-wing and opinionated daily newspaper. We have been arguing in our comments, essays and debate texts since the taz was founded in 1979. We often cannot and do not want to agree on an opinion. That's why you'll find some completely opposing positions here - all part of the very broad left-wing spectrum of opinions.
Everywhere in Africa, the generation of independence fighters had to experience that those born after them had different priorities. It is to South Africa's ANC's credit that it not only overcame apartheid in a peaceful and conciliatory manner, but also now accepts the waning of its political power. Freedom also means the right to separate, was the ANC's first reaction to its election defeats.
Different countervailing forces have now prevailed in different regions and milieus. South Africa is becoming politically more plural and diverse, which corresponds better to its social reality than the hegemony of a single party. When black and white once overcame apartheid together, South Africa was hopefully called the “Rainbow Nation”. It was always more aspiration than reality. Perhaps what is needed now is the end of ANC dominance for the rainbow to become a reality.